The first week of the Olympics was entertaining. Great athletes competing. But week two is just too much. I mean horse dancing and Busby Berkeley/Esther Williams 1930's swimming routines, now called synchronized swimming, really? Give me a break. And the announcers are just so into these bogus events. Bob Costas and Ryan Seacrest are bad enough, but listening to breathless announcers describing how this horse is just out of the world, or that water dancer's toenail was just too long stretches my tolerance. Have you noticed that while we watch these events once every four year, and are entirely unaware of them at any other time, we argue about whether a diver's entry splash is too big. We haven't a clue, but we all weigh in on everything, like baton passing, who knows about this shit, not us. We're on the sofa scarfing down Doritos and drinking Diet Coke, we know nothing. I know that the participants work their tails off to be just so good, and that's admirable, I just don't want to see a bunch of people twirling ribbons around. They do focus groups for everything, why not test the market for this Olympic thing? The results would mean the games thing would take about 3 days, less if they limited the track events to just watching events with Usain Bolt, whose worst time was about a nanosecond, I could deal with that.
And then there's the whole sexism piece. Women's beach volleyball is nothing more than soft core porn. The men wear pants and shorts and shirts while the women wear stuff that would offend Victoria's Secret, except for the Egyptian team, which wore burkas, probably too far in the other direction to permit peak performance. Women's gymnastics offers scantily clad teen age girls, maybe just a little creepy, while the men wear shorts and shirts. The women and men who throw the shot put and the hammer are big enough to scare the crap out me, so they can wear whatever the hell they want, just so they don't come to my house and beat me up.
So Sunday night is the closing ceremony, thankfully. Simone Biles is the U.S. flag bearer and she earned it. On Monday we can go back to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and all the other stuff on my Apple TV, or just watch network reruns and the Olympic coverage nightmares will pass.
